SOVERN NATION

Friday, November 11, 2016

It was legendary screenwriter William Goldman who said, famously, of Hollywood, "Nobody knows anything." Tuesday's Trumpquake suggests the same is true of America's punditocracy.

Like most other supposedly keen political observers, I delivered the worst prediction of my long career when I wrote in this space that Hillary Clinton would be elected president. It was only the third time in a dozen tries that I've gotten a presidential election wrong, but if I were you, I'd never want to hear my opinion again. So you're excused from reading the rest of this blog, without prejudice or penalty.

If you are still here, I do have a few thoughts. observations and nuggets of data (similar data were proven worthless Tuesday, so take these with a giant land mass of salt) to share.

HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?

That's a question I've been getting a lot, and one that I admit I've been asking myself, since I didn't predict it would. Trump's victory didn't take me by quite as great a surprise as it did others; I did predict almost a year ago that he would be the Republican nominee, provoking tremendous consternation and derision among many of my readers. But I also have believed for at least four years that Hillary Clinton was a prohibitive favorite to be our 45th president, and I didn't alter that assumption even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary.

It's been clear for a long time that much of the American electorate remains restless, angry, disenchanted. Yes, the economy is, empirically, a far sight better than it was when President Obama took office. Unemployment has fallen from almost ten percent to less than five. Instead of losing as many as 800,000 jobs a month, the country is creating as many as a quarter million. The U.S. economy is growing at about three percent a year, instead of plunging four percent, as it did in the spring of 2009. The Dow Jones average has tripled, meaning Americans with 401ks and other retirement and investment accounts have seen them more than recover from the Great Recession. But there are millions of people—no, tens of millions—who feel left behind by the recovery, whose paychecks are stagnant (or non-existent), who struggle to pay their bills and keep their credit card debt in check, who can't afford the still-rising cost of their health insurance premiums and their medications and their kids' education. They see factories close and jobs disappear and Mexican and Chinese and Somali and Puerto Rican immigrants arrive in their towns and they feel like they've lost their place in line, that someone else is stealing their shot at the American Dream, that they've been told to sit down, shut up, pay their taxes and take their lumps. They see the coastal elites with their app-driven lives and cars from the future and organic meal deliveries and wonder why everyone but them seems to be moving ahead. They live in places like Lycoming County, Pennsylvania and Manitowoc, Wisconsin and Hancock County, Ohio and Mariposa, California. The Democrats who live in these places voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary, not Hillary Clinton. And on Tuesday, most of the people who live there voted for Donald Trump.

Most of them don't like Donald Trump. They don't admire his behavior. They don't think he's the kind of man who should occupy the Oval Office. But they don't think much of Hillary Clinton either. These are not people who vote party, or even policies. They vote personality. They're not sure what Trump's beliefs on most issues even are (is anyone?), but the ones they do know about, they probably don't share. It doesn't matter. They're dissatisfied. They want change. They've wanted change for years, decades even. They voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, because he was new and different, and a more compelling personality than John McCain or Mitt Romney. They voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, because he was from Texas, not Washington, had some folksy charm and was more engaging than Al Gore or John Kerry. They voted for Bill Clinton before that, for similar reasons. And Ronald Reagan before him. And Jimmy Carter. You get the idea.

I interviewed quite a few white folks who voted for—even volunteered for—Barack Obama, but this time, pulled the lever for Trump (or punched the hole, or filled in the arrow, or touched the screen). That is hard for liberal Democrats to comprehend. How could anyone—anyone—help elect the first black president, a man considered so progressive that his opponents slurred him as a socialist, and then turn around and vote for Donald Trump, a man who questioned Obama's legitimacy, aligned himself with white supremacists and called for a roundup of Muslim Americans and illegal immigrants?

It's too easy for outsiders to dismiss these voters as crazy, racist, sexist, xenophobic, illiterate misogynists. You know, your standard basket of deplorables. But even Hillary Clinton recognized that many of them are not that at all. Some have college degrees. Some went to graduate school. Many are women. Some are people of color. What they share is a sense that things still aren't getting better, that the country is moving in the wrong direction, and the people in charge just don't get it.

Even so, there weren't quite enough of them to elect someone as reprehensible as Donald Trump. That's not my characterization of him: the exit polls (if you still believe in any polls of any sort, which I'll get to below) reveal that 60% of the voters think Trump is not qualified to be president, and 63% say he doesn't have the right temperament for the job. Even a quarter of those who voted for Trump feel this way. So how in the world did he win? Because Hillary Clinton failed to inspire, and motivate, and mobilize, the voters everyone assumed she would turn out to win. I've seen some articles talking about the "Trump wave" that we journalists missed. There was no Trump wave, at least not nationally. Trump is going to end up with slightly more votes than Mitt Romney got in 2012, about 61 million or so. That's what we expected him to get. We anticipated an electorate of roughly 130 million people, and that it would take somewhere close to 65 million votes to win.

What we did not expect—and no one on the Clinton team did either—was that Hillary would not even come close to getting as many votes as Barack Obama did. Obama won in 2008 with a record-shattering 69.5 million votes, more than seven million more than George W. Bush got four years before, when he set a new record. Obama's support fell in 2012, when he won with about 66 million votes, to Romney's 61 million. Clinton is on track to finish with somewhat more than 63 million this time. She should end up about 1.3% ahead of Trump in the national popular vote. We all thought there would be a massive turnout of women to elect the first female president, and a surge of Latinos to keep the wall-building Trump out of the White House. Neither materialized. The female share of the electorate actually fell one percent from 2012, and Clinton did only slightly better among them than Obama did. She outpolled Trump with women, 54-42%, while Obama beat Romney among women 55-44%. Only one percent more Latinos voted this time than did in 2012, and Trump did better among them than Romney did (Trump won 29% of the Latino vote vs. Romney's 27%). Clinton didn't come close to matching Obama's appeal to Latinos—Obama won 71% of Hispanic voters, to Clinton's 65%. White women actually preferred Trump, with 53% voting for him and only 43% voting for Hillary. We knew Trump would beat Clinton among whites overall, but he did it by a record-setting 58-37% margin. As expected, Clinton did not do as well with black voters as Obama did, but we thought she might make up that difference by attracting new Latino voters and widening the gender gap. It didn't happen.

Another myth: Trump brought out many new voters, and also won over the middle-of-the-road folks. Nope. Only ten percent of the voters were first-timers. And, tending to be younger, they voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, 56-40%. And self-described moderates preferred Clinton, 52-41.

So, she won the fence-straddlers in the middle, and she won the new voters, so why did she lose? Well, first of all—she didn't, at least not in the purest sense. Clinton won a plurality of the votes, and in fact, will have the widest margin of victory in the popular vote of anyone who didn't win the presidency since Samuel J. Tilden in the notorious disputed election of 1876 (I wrote a term paper on that one in college, if anyone is interested in digging that up). But she didn't meet turnout expectations in a few key places: Detroit, Philadelphia, Miami, Milwaukee. Even though she won in the cities, 59-35%, and Trump narrowly carried suburban America, he thumped Clinton in rural areas, 62-34. A relatively small number of white male Obama voters in those places I mentioned above gave Trump the narrowest of margins in three key states—Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida—and that gives him an Electoral College victory. At this hour's counting, Trump carries those three states by a total of 59,000 votes, or less than one percent. Toss in Pennsylvania, where Trump won by about one percent, and we're talking about less than one-tenth of one percent of the total votes cast Tuesday determining our next president. If Clinton had turned out literally another 0.1% of voters in the right cities, she'd have won those four states (technically, Michigan is still too close to call, with Trump ahead by less than 12,000 votes), which would have given her 303 electoral votes.

So, as you can see, it's not that Trump won this election as much as Clinton lost it. For all her vaunted advantages in fundraising and ground game and party support, she couldn't overcome the perception among white voters in rural America that she's a dishonest, lying, corrupt part of an elite political establishment that doesn't care about them and takes them for granted, if it thinks about them at all, a perception driven home in the campaign's final ten days by Trump's relentless ads portraying her as exactly that, and by FBI Director James Comey's untimely (for Clinton) announcement that he was investigating additional emails that might incriminate her, which ultimately amounted to absolutely nothing. Voters didn't turn to Trump in massive numbers in the closing days. They simply turned away from Clinton, enough to deny her victory in a handful of battleground states (Trump did do significantly better than Romney in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida, but Clinton surpassed Obama's totals there, too, because the overall turnout hit record levels in those three states. In Wisconsin, Trump matched Romney's vote total, while Clinton fell about 200,000 short of Obama's).

Although I do think it's risky to write off the Trump Voter as uneducated, Trump did score an historic edge among voters without a college degree. In 2008, Obama and Romney essentially split college graduates, and Obama won among those without their degrees. This time? Clinton won the educated voters, 52-43%, while Trump won the less educated ones, 52-44. And among white voters who didn't finish college, Trump won resoundingly, 67-28. Those are unprecedented gaps.

So this election, like virtually every election without an incumbent president in recent times, was about Change. New. Promise. Different. When the first exit polling data came in Tuesday afternoon, what did voters say was the quality they were looking for most in their next president? "Can bring needed change." Uh-oh. Alarm bells went off at our KCBS Election Desk. That was not a good harbinger for Clinton. Two-thirds of the voters told the exit pollsters the country was on the wrong track. Yikes. That boded well for Trump. It wasn't until later that we got more data: A whopping 83% of those who said "bring needed change" was most important, cast their ballots for Trump. Even though Clinton won 66% of the people who said "has good judgment" was most important, and 90% of those who were looking for someone with "the right experience," there weren't as many of those voters in the mix. Which brings us to one final question...

HOW DID WE GET IT SO WRONG?

Here, I posit the theory, supported by the monograph's worth of data I just laid on you, that we didn't, really. That's not a copout. I said Hillary would win the popular vote by more than five percent. I am an idiot. But the final polls all coalesced around a Clinton win by about 3 or 4%. I know when people hear, "Clinton will win by four percent" and she wins the popular vote by only one percent, they think, "Boy, the pollsters really blew it." But polling is rough science. Pollsters extrapolate results from small samples. Their sample sizes can be off. The way they weight the data they collect to reflect what they think the makeup of the electorate will be can be wrong. But even so, missing the final popular vote by 2 or 3 points is well within most polls' margin of error. A poll that says Clinton will win by three points means in fact, she could win by six, or it could be a tie, or the final tally could fall anywhere within that range. Which it did.

So where the pollsters (and I) really did blow it was in the electoral vote. But again, as noted above, Trump won that by the slimmest of margins, by denying Clinton a fractional percentage of votes in states you can count on one hand (I suggest using the thumb for Michigan). And really, the only places the polls were off significantly were Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The final four polls in Florida had Clinton up two, Trump up three, and two were a tie. Trump won by about one percent, right in the middle of that spread. The polls in Wisconsin had Clinton up six to eight points, but no one bothered polling there in the last week of the campaign. The needle was already moving to Trump—or, more accurately, away from Clinton—but there was no one on hand to record it. The same was true in Michigan, where Clinton was consistently ahead by four or five points and it ended, essentially, in a tie. Perhaps in 2020, the pollsters will conduct more surveys, and later ones, in the key battleground states.

The other way we blew it was by how we read the polls we did get. Most political pundits, and even most people within the Clinton and Trump campaigns, were pretty sure Hillary was going to win. All the data, until the Comey letter came out on October 28, said the race was over. My interactions with voters in Ohio convinced me Trump would win there, and the polling supported that. If I had seen consistent survey data showing Clinton ahead in Ohio, I would have reconsidered my conclusion. But I didn't. So I put the Buckeye State in Trump's column in my final prediction (I remain astounded by how many pundits said Clinton would win Ohio. There were literally zero data to support that). But the polls were steady for Clinton in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. There was no reason to suspect a Clinton collapse there. So when we looked at the final polls, both nationally and in swing states, we tended to believe the ones that supported what we already believed to be true: that she would win. This bias reinforced a flawed conclusion. We disregarded polls that deviated from our expectations. They must be outliers. They can't be right. Given a choice between surveys that bolstered our preconceptions and ones that challenged them, we embraced the former and scoffed at the latter. This wasn't because we wanted Clinton to win; it was because we thought she would. I didn't want Trump to win the Republican nomination, but I predicted he would because all the available data, and my own observations of voters, told me that he would. In this case, even though I had ample contact with Trump supporters, I didn't believe there were enough of them to overcome what I thought was the larger universe of Clinton voters, a universe that collapsed into a black hole for Democrats on Tuesday.

I called three states wrong on Tuesday (four, if Michigan ends up a Trump state). I got two of the U.S. Senate races wrong. That's not bad, I suppose, but it falls far short of my usual standard, and bottom line, I PREDICTED THE PERSON WHO LOST WOULD WIN. Please allow me to hang my hat on this caveat that I included in Tuesday's prediction:

There could be a hidden pool of Trump voters who aren't showing up in the polls. There could be a Trump Effect, with respondents afraid to tell pollsters they're secretly planning to pull the lever for Donald. There could be a huuuge turnout of white men without college degrees who descend on polling places en masse to Make America Great Again.

As things turned out, that's exactly what happened, and in just enough critical places where Clinton failed to make up the difference.

Okay. That's a really long explanation of how Trump pulled off the biggest upset in modern political history, and how I missed seeing it coming. I underestimated the level of antipathy for Clinton, and I overestimated her ability to get her voters to the polls. The lesson for Democrats next time? Nominate someone who can run as an outsider, as a legitimate agent of change (a la Barack Obama or Bill Clinton), especially if President Trump (anybody used to saying that yet?) fails to deliver. The people who switched to him this time won't be patient with him for long. Certainly not as patient as you've been with me.

Final note regarding the exit polls: You'll notice I treat this data as if it were handed down on stone tablets. I am always amused by how we deride the pollsters for being so off the mark before an election, and then regurgitate the exit polling data as if it were stone cold fact. It isn't. It could be wrong too. But—there are some critical differences. Pre-election surveys are based on an estimate of what we think the electorate will look like, a best guess of who's likely to vote, and then a weighting to reflect the expected demographic breakdown. Exit polls are a measure of people who have actually voted. We don't have to guess how many Latina women over 50 will vote; we can count the ones standing in front of us coming out of the polling place. And the sample size is much larger. Instead of a survey of one or two thousand people on the phone, the National Election Pool (a data-sharing consortium of which CBS is a member) interviews more than 100,000 people, mostly in person. The response rate is much, much higher, and the margin of error much, much lower. People could still lie about how they voted, but they're less likely to do that in a face-to-face interview. This data is how we call the results in states long before the votes are counted. When the returns start to come in, if they hew closely to what the exit polling suggests they will be, we can deduce that the actual result will be what the polls say. If a state is very close, the polling data may not be enough, delaying a call. This is also how we knew something was amiss in the "butterfly ballot" counties in Florida in 2000. The exit polls said Al Gore had won Florida, because voters told the pollsters they'd voted for him, when in fact many of them had cast ballots for Pat Buchanan by mistake. So when their votes were counted, they weren't for Gore, confounding the exit poll data.There can still be weighting errors in these polls of course, and people who refuse to answer can throw things off, but in general, we believe the exit poll data to be fairly reliable. Of course, we thought Hillary Clinton would win Pennsylvania, too.

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

Could Donald Trump really be elected President of the United States today?
Sure. Anything is possible.
The Chicago Cubs could win three straight do-or-die games to capture their first World Series since the Roosevelt administration—and that's Teddy Roosevelt.
The Director of the FBI could turn the presidential race on its head by announcing he's found hundreds of thousands of emails that may incriminate Hillary Clinton on the laptop of a narcissistic sex addict (no, not Trump)—and then, nine days later, pull an Emily Litella and say, "never mind."
Russian hackers could penetrate America's voting machines and switch enough ballots in key swing state precincts to throw the presidency to The Donald.
Okay, that last one hasn't happened—yet (as far as we know)—but barring something similarly outrageous and unforeseen, it seems almost certain that America will indeed elect its first female president by choosing Hillary Rodham Clinton to succeed Barack Obama.
I've been making official presidential predictions since 1972, and it's time for my quadrennial crawl onto the limb of potential public humiliation (I think I've used that line, or a variant, every four years too). I have a great track record, but as we all know, past performance is no guarantee of future results. So just because I've been right nine times out of eleven, and have never missed on predicting the eventual Republican nominee (yes, I picked Trump this year), and have an 80% success rate on the Democratic primary, and got every U.S. Senate race right last time, and nailed Obama's margin of victory in the popular vote, does not mean I'll get any of it right in 2016. This stuff gets harder, and weirder, every year.

I believe Hillary Clinton will outperform the polls and do better in the popular vote than most of the forecasts suggest. If California's turnout is large enough, she might even exceed 50% (California alone supplied 60% of Barack Obama's margin of victory over Mitt Romney in 2012). I am not as bullish on her chances in a couple of key swing states, Ohio and North Carolina, as some other pundits seem to be, so while I do see her topping 300 in the Electoral College, I am not predicting as wide a margin there as you might see from some of my colleagues. She could hit 323. Her ceiling is as high as 352. But I don't think she gets there.

She doesn't need to, of course. 270 is sufficient, and she'll have plenty to spare, even to withstand a few "faithless electors" when the Electoral College meets in December.

There could be a hidden pool of Trump voters who aren't showing up in the polls. There could be a Trump Effect, with respondents afraid to tell pollsters they're secretly planning to pull the lever for Donald. There could be a huuuge turnout of white men without college degrees who descend on polling places en masse to Make America Great Again. But the early voting data, and the long lines of Latinos, in particular, voting in places like Florida, northern Virginia and Las Vegas, suggest the wind is at Clinton's back, not Trump's, and the momentum he was building since James Comey's October 28th announcement has faded, and reversed field.

A couple of points on the swing states:

OHIO - Trump has consistently led in the polls here. Only a couple—notably, Ipsos, which is an excellent polling firm—have had Clinton ahead, and just barely. Ohio is a reliable bellwether, voting for the presidential winner in every election since 1964. But the demographic changes altering vote patterns in other key states are not happening (yet) in the Buckeye State, which is now older and whiter than its Midwestern neighbors, and this could be the year it falls out of step with the rest of the nation. I spent some time in Ohio during this campaign and outside of Cleveland, it sure felt like Trump country to me. Obama carried the state twice, thanks to very large and late turnouts of African Americans. I don't see as many of those folks going to the polls for Clinton, and there probably aren't enough Latinos in Ohio to make up the difference. I could be wrong, of course, and Hillary could win here, but I think it's Trump's big prize on Election Night.

NORTH CAROLINA - Another tossup state, where African Americans fueled an Obama victory in 2008. But Mitt Romney won it back for the GOP in 2012. Again, the black turnout will be down this time. Can Clinton's superior ground operation put her over the top? Maybe. But my gut tells me that Trump wins this one, too, and incumbent Republican Richard Burr holds off Democratic challenger Deborah Ross in the U.S. Senate race. This one is truly too close to call for me. Clinton could win it, but I'm giving it to Trump.

FLORIDA - A massive surge of anti-Trump Latino voting has been happening in the Sunshine State the last few days. Early voting there shattered records. There could be enough votes for Trump in rural areas and the Panhandle to offset Clinton's big advantage in South Florida, but I think she ekes this one out.

If I'm wrong on any states this time, it will be on one or more of those three. They're the ones in which I have the least confidence. I see Nevada safely in Clinton's column, Iowa going to Trump, Hillary taking New Hampshire, Virginia and Colorado, and Trump surprising many of the pundits and hanging on to Arizona (I could be wrong on that one, too).

In the US Senate race, what once looked like a sure bet that Democrats would win a majority has faded into a tossup over the last fortnight as the presidential race tightened. Republicans have a 54-46 edge right now (including independents Angus King and Bernie Sanders, who caucus with the Democrats). So if Democrats gain four seats and Hillary Clinton is elected president, it'll be a 50-50 tie controlled by the Democrats (Vice President Tim Kaine would provide the tiebreaking vote). If Trump wins the presidency, Democrats need to net five seats for Senate control.

So that gives us a 50-50 Senate, with Democrats in control by virtue of Tim Kaine being vice president. making Chuck Schumer of New York the new Senate Majority Leader.

Ross could beat Burr; Kander could upset Blunt. Either of those would give the Democrats outright control. But Ayotte could also come back and hang on against Hassan, potentially giving the GOP a 51-49 edge.

In the House of Representatives, I believe Democrats will fall far short of the 30 seats they need to win to regain control and make Nancy Pelosi Speaker again. I see them flipping 14-18 seats, narrowing the Republican majority but leaving Paul Ryan as Speaker.

There you have it. Tune in this afternoon and tonight to see how wrong I was. And whether Trump or Clinton will be the new Leader of the Free World. Personally, I love Election Day. It's like Christmas morning for me. I can't wait to open our shiny new president.

Our live, wall-to-wall coverage of the election returns begins at 4pm Pacific on KCBS Radio (106.9 fm, 740 am, www.cbssf.com) and will run until at least midnight Pacific. We will bring you national, state and local results, as well as reaction and analysis, live reports from all over the country and California. I will be tweeting like a maniac at @SovernNation, so be sure to follow me for rapid-fire results and in-between-radio-reports analysis, breaking news, and pithy nuggets. Then we'll be back at it starting at 6am Pacific for morning after recrimination and regret. See you there. And don't forget to vote!

Thursday, October 27, 2016

"I think California is extremely winnable. I think that there's a real groundswell happening here in California. I've got a lot of little ticklers out there that are indicators to me just how significant our vote count could be here."

That's what Liz Ritchie, Northern California field operations director for Donald Trump's presidential campaign, told me Wednesday about her candidate's chances in the Golden State. Her apparent optimism belies all recent polling data, and the campaign's own activities in California. Hours after Ritchie's confident assertion, a new statewide survey by the Public Policy Institute of California showed Trump's support here cratering to an historic low. Just 28% of likely California voters say they'll vote (or already have voted) for Trump, versus 54% for Hillary Clinton. That means Trump may well deliver the worst performance of any major party presidential nominee in California history. When FDR was re-elected in 1936, he thumped Kansas Governor Alf Landon in the Golden State, 67-32%.

Despite Trump's early bluster about competing for California's mother lode of 55 electoral votes, and his frequent trips here over the late spring and summer to fundraise and campaign, this bluest of blue states has always been safely in Clinton's column. So much so that Clinton's campaign—and Trump's too—has turned California into a giant political gold mine from which to export resources into nine critical states that are still toss-ups. Clinton's Brooklyn brain trust has declared California its national call center. Literally tens of thousands of eager volunteers are staffing dozens of field offices up and down the state, using sophisticated online tools to contact and mobilize voters from Florida to Arizona, from New Hampshire to Nevada. During a visit to the new Oakland office, its director, Katie Hooper, told me that the Northern California volunteers alone are placing more than half a million calls a day. That Get Out The Vote operation will only intensify in the campaign's final days, climaxing with a 96-hour push leading up to the closing of the polls on November 8.

Mind your time zones: a sign on the wall at Hillary Clinton's Oakland field office

Ritchie is running a similar operation for Trump. She claims "hundreds of thousands of volunteers" in California, and says if the national campaign would let her, she could unleash them as a Golden State ground force. "We were kind of gearing up for that, we got prepared for it. It's not like we couldn't do it." But her orders from New York are to send "strike teams" of Californians to Nevada and Arizona, to try to swing those states into Trump's column, and to utilize the same calling technology Clinton is using to reach likely Trump voters in other toss-up states and get them to the polls. "We're going after the battleground states because those are mandatory wins and we don't want to allow them to be neglected in any way." But, she says, "if it looks like we've got a leeway in our battleground states, I'm sure we'll implement" her plan to mobilize her California volunteers in their home state.

It's easy to say Ritchie is putting as brave a face as she can on a looming campaign failure of epic proportions. But she and Trump's other key operatives here—state director Tim Clark, campaign spokesman Jon Cordova—seem genuinely optimistic and enthusiastic about their chances. Do they not read polls? Do they not believe them? Are they in denial?

"We know what we're seeing on the ground," one Trump operative told me. "We have more volunteers than we can handle. There are Trump signs everywhere. He drew huge crowds here and he's still having huge rallies all across the country."

In the last few days, Trump's team has been invoking Harry Truman's upset comeback of 1948, when all the pundits said President Truman was doomed to defeat at the hands of New York Governor Thomas Dewey. But compared to 2016, the polls of 1948 might as well have been carved on stone tablets. Even giving Trump the most generous benefit of the doubt—conceding to him the battleground states where he's either slightly ahead, it's a dead heat, or his deficit is within the margin of polling error (Ohio, Iowa, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada) and giving him Utah and all of Maine and Nebraska (which award some electoral votes by congressional district)—he still loses the Electoral College to Clinton, 304-234.

And if Clinton wins North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada, which polls suggest she may well do, to go along with expected victories in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Colorado and all-important Florida, her margin of victory balloons to 336-202. If she manages to eke out Ohio and Maine too, it's a 358-180 bloodbath. If she confounds decades of history and upsets Trump in Texas and Utah, her electoral vote tally will top 400 (this is not likely, but it's at least as likely as Trump winning the White House by running the table in the swing states).

President Harry S Truman exults in his surprise 1948 election, despite the

Chicago Tribune's premature declaration of his political demise

In the last two weeks, Team Trump has sent out at least three emails seeking more California volunteers to staff phone banks and make canvassing runs across the border to Nevada and Arizona. So Ritchie's comments may well be disingenuous. But even taken at face value, large crowds and a minority core of passionate supporters do not necessarily translate into victory at the polls. Just ask Bernie Sanders. When the circus comes to town, lots of people go see the show. That doesn't mean they all want to climb aboard the elephant. The tent seems ready to come crashing down on Donald Trump.

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Stenosis is an abnormal narrowing of a pathway in your body, often in your spinal column or neck. It can be a debilitating condition that leads to weakness and paralysis. Right now, we're witnessing a rare, self-induced case of campaign stenosis that is narrowing Donald Trump's path to the presidency so much that it's almost entirely closed off. And it's only early August.

Elections aren't typically won or lost in August, not before the presidential debates, unforeseen world events, an October Surprise, and who knows what else. But this is a most atypical election year (that's just in from the Keen Sense of the Obvious Bureau), one in which several major newspapers have already endorsed Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, one in which Trump got virtually no bounce from the Republican National Convention while Clinton got one from the DNC that is lasting well beyond what is normal, hardening from a bounce into a rock solid lead.

Consider this: in the last ten days, major national polls have shown Clinton beating Trump by ten, twelve, evenfifteen points. Her average lead right now is around eight points. It's true that summer surveys are far from conclusive, and Trump could still (and probably will) narrow the gap considerably. But the last two presidents, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, never had leads remotely that large. In the last forty years, only Ronald Reagan in 1984 and Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 ever enjoyed polling leads this substantial at this point in a presidential campaign. Reagan went on to win by 18 points, and Clinton won both his races by comfortable margins.

Hillary Clinton, despite unfavorability ratings that would be the worst in history if not for the even worse ones of her even more despised opponent, is poised to win the presidency in a landslide. Yes, a landslide. Not because of those lopsided national polling numbers, but because she is pulling away in states that should be closely contested, and could even capture states the Democrats should have no reasonable hope of winning.

Here's how this election will turn out if Clinton wins the same states Obama did four years ago (interactive maps courtesy of 270towin.com, where you can make your own):

So that means Clinton starts with a presumed Electoral College advantage of 332 to 206, if she just holds on to all 27 of Obama's blue states, and Trump wins all 24 red ones Mitt Romney carried (50 states, plus the District of Columbia).

Trump's hopes rest on taking away Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, which would give him a 273-265 victory in the Electoral College. Or, if he carries Ohio and Florida but not Pennsylvania, perhaps making up for it by winning in Iowa, Virginia and Nevada, which would give him a 278-260 win and look like this:

Here's where Trump's electoral stenosis comes in. Recent polls in those battleground states show Clinton winning Pennsylvania by between 9 and 11 points. If not for its history, that would make it a Clinton shoo-in, not a swing state. She's beating Trump in Colorado by from 8 to 13 points, and in Virginia by 7 to 12. In fact, the Clinton campaign is shifting resources from those two states, so confident is it now of victory there. And the shift to Clinton goes on: WBUR has her beating Trump by 17 in New Hampshire. The last two polls in Michigan put Clinton up by 9 and 10. These are no longer battlegrounds; they are killing fields.

Ohio, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina and Iowa remain close, and could still go either way. But Clinton could lose all of those and still win 273-265 as long as she carries Pennsylvania, Virginia, Colorado and New Hampshire, where, we've just noted, she has commanding leads.

A more likely scenario, in fact, is that Clinton not only sweeps most, if not all, of the swing states, but pulls off upset victories in historically Republican states, conservative strongholds like Utah and Georgia, and purplish places like Arizona. Clinton should not be competitive in Utah and Georgia, and Arizona should be relatively safe for Trump. But this is Donald Trump we're talking about. He is loathed by many conservative Republicans in Utah and Colorado, in particular, and his anti-Muslim rhetoric repulses Mormons throughout the Intermountain West, while his anti-illegal immigration vitriol is galvanizing the Latino vote in Arizona. So Arizona, which no Democrat has won since Bill Clinton in 1996, is a dead heat. So is Georgia, where the two most recent polls actually show Clinton ahead - even though no Democrat has carried the Peach State since her husband in 1992. And Utah? Tougher to predict, thanks to a dearth of polling data, but Libertarian Gary Johnson is running strong there, and with Mormon conservative ex-CIA agent Evan McMullin entering the race as an independent wild card, a Clinton victory there over Trump in a splintered field is certainly not out of the question.

So, one last map: If Clinton were to run the table in the battlegrounds, and tip just a few typically red states into her column, the country would look like this:

That's 31 states for Clinton, only 20 for Trump, and a 380-158 Electoral College landslide, the biggest since George H.W. Bush swamped Michael Dukakis in 1988.

Of course, this election could also end in a 269-269 tie, if things broke just right, which could leave us with President Donald Trump and Vice President Tim Kaine - but that's a scenario to be explained in another column - and only if if Trump can somehow stop dealing body blows to his own candidacy.

Sunday, July 31, 2016

The rumors crackled across the convention floor like a smoldering wildfire: "They're going to turn their backs on Hillary Clinton. They're going to walk out. They're going to throw toilet paper at her. They're going to rush the stage."

"We can't let her speak. She should not be allowed to speak," one #BernieOrBust delegate told me the morning of Hillary Clinton's acceptance speech, refusing to accept the legitimacy of Clinton's nomination for president by the Democratic Party. He was part of a hardcore minority within the Bernie Sanders delegation to the Democratic National Convention that felt betrayed by its leader. "He promised us we'd fight at the convention. We came here expecting an open convention. Instead, he sold us out. He no longer has the moral authority to tell us what to do."

These delegates, perhaps two hundred out of Sanders' almost two thousand in Philadelphia, might have been surprised, even outraged, to learn that Bernie Sanders was actually working closely with Hillary Clinton in Philadelphia to keep them from derailing the convention.

Conversations with more than a dozen delegates, floor whips and officials from the Clinton campaign, the Sanders campaign and the Democratic National Committee reveal just how they did it.

Most importantly, the Clinton campaign, not convention organizers, controlled the floor of the DNC. The yellow-vested floor whips told Clinton delegates where to sit, what signs to hold, what chants and cheers to yell and when to yell them. They seated delegations strategically, at first trying to dilute the strength of the Sanders delegates by splitting them up, then by surrounding them and keeping them as far back from the stage as possible. As in Cleveland at the RNC, the California delegation was the largest, and the loudest. In Cleveland, the Californians were all Trump delegates, so the Golden State crew was seated near the stage, where they could present a united front on television and shout down any dissidents supporting Ted Cruz, or any other challenge to Donald Trump. That worked to a T, as the Californians relished their role and overwhelmed all opposition.

But in Philadelphia, the California delegation consisted of 330 Clinton delegates and 221 Sanders supporters. So instead of a choice spot on the floor, the Californians were exiled to Section 105, one level up, far stage right, in a corner. Clinton's delegates arrived early each day and reserved all the seats closest to the floor, sometimes filling them with non-delegates to force the Sanders team to the rear of the section, where they would not be seen on television and would be less likely to be heard.

Sanders merged his campaign operation with Clinton's. There were no Sanders whips on the floor. The floor captains wore headsets, receiving radio instructions from the "boiler room," where senior operatives from the combined campaigns told them how to thwart any insurrections by the Sanders diehards. They were given a list of the chants the Sanders delegates might use, in advance, and had a corresponding list of counter-chants. So when TV viewers heard loud chants of "Hillary" at seemingly random moments, it was to drown out chants of "No TPP" started by some of the California Sanders delegates. When they heard "USA" break out at inexplicable times—a chant heard more often in the past at Republican conventions than Democratic ones—it was to cover chants of "No More War" coming from Section 105. When Sanders delegates stood up with homemade signs denouncing Clinton, or tried to wave the "LIAR" signs they'd made from the "HILLARY" ones handed out in the hall, Clinton delegates stood up with giant banners, designed to look homemade, but really, stashed ahead of time by the campaign, like this one:

California Sanders delegates doctoring signs in protest

The Sanders delegates also claim the Clinton campaign or the DNC installed white noise machines above certain sections to drown out any anti-Clinton chanting.

In the end, Clinton won. Yes, some delegates walked out, some turned their backs, many chanted, but for the tens of millions watching at home and around the world, that revolution was not televised. The #NeverHillary Sanders folks who were sitting front and center, in the New York and Florida delegations, stood up and waved signs and chanted, but never rushed the stage, as the Secret Service had heard they might. They wouldn't have gotten anywhere near Hillary Clinton, but the sight of the party's nominee being hustled off the stage while security forces subdued on onslaught of delegates would have doomed any hope the Democrats had of presenting an image of unity to the nation.

The upstart Sanders renegades had whips of their own, instructing their members when to chant, how to assert themselves and demand seats that were supposed to be held only for delegates, distributing fluorescent yellow-green "Enough Is Enough" shirts to wear on the convention's final night. But there weren't enough of them committed to disrupting Clinton to overcome the cards stacked against them. I was on the convention floor interviewing Donna Brazile, named interim chair of the DNC after Debbie Wasserman Schultz's email-induced fall from grace, when Jeff Weaver, campaign manager for Bernie Sanders, happened by. "Excuse me," Brazile said, interrupting our interview. "There's my brother Jeff Weaver. I need to tell him how much I love him." Brazile proceeded to hug and laugh with Weaver, whisper in his ear and tell him how much she looked forward to working with him. It was more than just a public display of unity. While Sanders' most determined delegates felt betrayed and deceived by the Democratic National Committee, the man running their hero's campaign was already in cahoots with it. The Sanders brain trust turned over its intelligence on those resisting his endorsement of Clinton, so that Clinton's convention managers would know what to expect, and how to prepare. The combined operation even had spies within the rebel group.

"It's called politics," a California Clinton delegate responded. She asked me not to use her name. "This is how the game is played at this level. We're not doing anything they wouldn't do, if they knew how. They're just new to the sport. We're better at it than they are."

Sunday, July 24, 2016

I’m winging my
way to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, after covering the
Republicans’ confab in Cleveland last week (apologies for not blogging from the
RNC, but the California delegation’s distant accommodations in Sandusky, Ohio
added two hours of driving to my already overstuffed days and too-short nights there, and the need
for sleep trumped posting to the blog. I’ll make up for it with far too many
words here).

The RNC was the
most off-kilter political convention I’ve ever covered, marred by Melania
Trump’s plagiarized speech, the open political warfare on the floor between the
Ted Cruz delegates and the Donald Trump campaign, a bizarre and oddly
programmed hodgepodge of motley speakers, and finally, the longest acceptance
speech in American history, Trump’s 76-minute recitation of the doom and gloom
that, in his eyes, has rendered America no longer great.

Debbie Wasserman
Shultz, the Miami Congresswoman who chairs the Democratic National Committee, buzzed
about the periphery of the RNC like a mosquito waiting to suck blood and raise
welts. She talked to any and all comers about what a mess the convention was,
and how her party was unified in its fight against Trump’s divided GOP, even
ribbing her Republican counterpart, Reince Priebus, reminding him via Twitter
that she was in town and available to show him how to run a smoother operation.

Well, as I write
this, the Democrats are embroiled in pre-convention controversy of their own,
and it turns out it isn’t always sunny in Philadelphia, after all. Friday,
Wikileaks released thousands of hacked DNC emails—perhaps stolen by Russians
trying to help Trump win the presidency, in return for policies more favorable
to the Kremlin—that include embarrassing evidence that Shultz and other party
higher-ups were indeed trying to sabotage the insurgent candidacy of Bernie
Sanders and ensure the nomination of Hillary Clinton (and Shultz trying to score tickets to “Hamilton” - DNC communications chief Luis
Miranda is the father of Broadway wunderkind Lin-Manuel Miranda. It’s reassuring
to know that clout has its limits). As the leaked emails broke, the furious pro-Sanders
forces, armed with new proof that yes, the system is rigged, were fighting in
the Rules Committee to abolish superdelegates in future campaigns, to make it
easier for an outsider like Sanders to wrest the nomination from an anointed
insider, like Clinton. Sanders demanded that Shultz step down. So things were
unraveling for the Democrats on two fronts.

Just before my
flight took off came this bit of breaking news (what would I do without Twitter and my crackphone, I mean iPhone?):
Shultz announced that she will resign from the DNC—as soon as this week’s
convention is over. She will still wield the gavel, opening and closing the
convention, though her presence may be diminished. Score another one for Sanders,
who sees her as his bête noire, who may have cost him the nomination and,
perhaps, the presidency. This development will surely overshadow everything
else on the convention’s opening day. Never mind your message, Senator,
Governor, Congressman, up-and-coming obscure state lawmaker—what do you think
about your party chair resigning under fire? How can you argue the Democrats are
unified? Will the 1900 or so Sanders delegates break this convention wide open
by feuding with the 2800 Clinton loyalists?

This will be my
seventh national party convention, and I’ve never seen the kind of
head-spinning, not-according-to-plan kerfuffles we got at the RNC—and now the
DNC promises more of the same.

But there’s one
critical difference, and it comes from the top: the presidential nominees themselves,
and their closest rivals, and it’s instructive as to what kind of president
each might make.

Donald Trump ran
roughshod over the Cruz minority in Cleveland. To use his words, he “crushed
them.” His team kept its boots on their throats in the Rules Committee, refused
to allow a floor vote on the question of whether delegates should be released
from their commitment to support Trump on the first ballot, and turned back
every challenge from the Dump Trump brigade, without exception or compromise.
Meanwhile, John Kasich—the Republican
governor of the swing state hosting the convention—boycotted the whole
affair, Marco Rubio gave a perfunctory 85-second address via video from
Florida, and Ted Cruz, in a prime time speech, thumbed his nose at Trump and
his rabid delegates by refusing to endorse him and urging America to vote its
conscience. Bedlam broke out on the floor. I saw people crying and trembling,
so shaken they couldn’t speak. Seriously. The party was ripped asunder for all
to see. The schism was muted, momentarily, by the rousing reception the
conventioneers gave Trump’s marathon acceptance address, only to have the wound
gashed open again the very next morning by Trump himself, with a rambling
diatribe against Cruz. There will be no endorsements, no party unity, no
coalition to defeat Clinton.

It appears the
Philadelphia Story could have a quite different ending. Rather than risk the
unruly disturbance of a floor vote on the superdelegates issue, Clinton’s team
is forming a “Unity Commission” with the Sanders supporters to study how to
reduce the role of superdelegates, and cut their number by two-thirds. That
defuses that tension. Instead of fighting to keep her job, the lightning rod
Shultz is stepping down, presumably at Clinton’s behest, or at the very least
with her acquiescence. Though many of his delegates remain livid, and may stage
protests of their own—there’s talk of turning their backs, or even walking out,
during Tim Kaine’s acceptance to register their disappointment that Hillary
didn’t choose a more progressive running mate, and you can count on some fiery
FeelTheBern-ing during the roll call vote of the states—Sanders himself remains
steadfastly in Clinton’s corner. He is not rescinding his endorsement of
Clinton for president and on Monday night will deliver it, with full-throated
enthusiasm, in his prime time convention address. His campaign says he will
make, in great and passionate detail, the case for defeating Donald Trump and
electing Hillary Clinton, and will tout the “most progressive platform in party
history”—which Clinton agreed to, in yet another mollifying move. In fact,
Hillary is doing everything she can to minimize the controversies, forge unity,
and turn each potential conflagration into a sing-along bonfire.

Can you imagine
Trump agreeing to a Unity Commission with his “crushed” rivals? Or any of the
top runners-up (especially Ted Cruz) urging the country to vote for him? I
didn’t think so.

On Thursday
night, Hillary Clinton will strike a far different tone from Trump’s. Trump
didn’t give us Ronald Reagan “morning in America’ oratory. It was more like a
dark and stormy midnight. I expect Clinton will present a brighter, hopeful
vision of an America that has come a long way and, with her at the helm, will
rise even higher. She will try to inspire and elevate. She will talk about
breaking boundaries, shattering glass ceilings, and building bridges instead of
walls. She will tell us that Love Trumps Hate. She will try her hardest to seem
human and humane, to connect emotionally, to appeal to optimism and hope and
not just fear. In the last few days, Clinton has shown that she practices politics
as the art of compromise, not the art of the one-sided deal Trump seems to be
trying to sell America. The Democratic convention could still devolve into a
rip-roaring free-for-all (especially if many Bernie backers refuse to follow
their candidate’s lead), but something tells me the DNC and RNC will end up
being as different as night and day.

Follow Doug’s convention tweets at
@SovernNation. He reports live from the DNC in Philly twice each morning at
either 6:20, 7:30 or 8:30, and again at 4:20pm, 5:11pm, 6:11pm, 7:11pm and
8:11pm (all Pacific time) on KCBS Radio in San Francisco. Listen live at
106.9FM, 740AM, or CBSSF.com, where you can also hear recorded reports and see
photos. Even more on the KCBS Facebook page!

Saturday, February 20, 2016

Political parties used to have wings. 2016 is the year they developed lanes.

That's what happens when you have seventeen candidates seeking your presidential nomination, as the Republican Party did at the start of this campaign. It's pretty tough to crowd seventeen people onto two wings. Eventually, some might fall off, or even choose to jump. And a creature with seventeen wings, even a political party, is too terrifying even to consider.

Hence, the advent of lanes, popularized by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and his shrewd strategic team. Even if he doesn't win the presidency, or even the Republican nomination—and I still don't think he will—Cruz will go down in history as the guy who changed the way pundits talk about campaigns. The lane metaphor has become ubiquitous. It's the fallback catch phrase for the talking heads of the politigentsia (did I just coin that word?). When's the last time you caught anyone referring to the "right wing" of the GOP?

The way Cruz saw it, there are four lanes in the grand new version of the Grand Old Party: the evangelical Christian lane, the Tea Party lane, the libertarian lane (read: the Ron Paul lane), and the moderate-establishment-old boy lane (read: the Bush-Romney-Bush lane). As a nakedly ambitious man unable to even pretend to conceal his Machiavellian ways behind a facade of niceties, Cruz was only too happy to articulate his four-lane construct to any and all observers as he launched his long-shot bid for the presidency. None of us took him too seriously, giving him barely any chance of breaking out of the pack ("way too conservative, unlikable, irritating, a niche candidate," we said). Four lanes, huh? Nice idea, Ted. Lovely. Good luck with that. Now go filibuster something and leave us alone.

But Cruz, who has proven time and again to be an absolutely brilliant politician (you may not want him to be president, but he would make one hell of a campaign manager) who thinks many moves ahead of his adversaries (if running for president were chess, Cruz would be the Bobby Fischer of our time), had a plan. He would run from the Tea Party lane, as he did when he stunned establishment darling David Dewhurst to capture a U.S. Senate seat in Texas. But he would also court the hell out of the evangelical Christians (pardon my blasphemy), and also go after the Libertarians, whom Rand Paul was taking for granted. Cruz figured if he could consolidate those three lanes, he would be the last conservative standing, and the only viable alternative to whomever captured the moderate-establishment lane, presumably one of the Four Govs, Bush, Kasich, Christie or Walker.

Cruz succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams except his own. Walker wilted early. Paul petered out. Christie and Bush are gone. The other red meat conservatives, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, were yesterday's news. Bobby Jindal couldn't get out of the starting gate. Rick Perry became a late night punchline. Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina each had their moment in the sun, only to fade into asterisk land (Carson seems to have invented his own lane: the extremely slow lane, in which all the drivers fall asleep at the wheel until they veer into the Bushes). He won the Iowa caucus by doing exactly what he'd planned: uniting the evangelical, libertarian and Tea Party lanes behind his candidacy and presenting himself as the only one worthy of taking on the unexpected Big Dog, Donald Trump.

But he ran into a roadblock in New Hampshire, and now he's hit a speed bump in South Carolina, where he finished third, tailgating-close to Marco Rubio, but third nonetheless, in a state full of evangelicals Cruz had assumed he would win.

As I wrote before Iowa voters went to their caucuses, this is a three-man race (it didn't just become one, as some are saying after South Carolina; it's been one for months). John Kasich still has illusions of emerging from the establishment lane, but he's reading road signs that simply aren't there. With Jeb! out of the running, the party establishment and moderate money men are much more likely to coaslesce around Rubio as their only hope to stop Trump. Carson is running on fumes (and seems like he's inhaling them, too) and will be the next to fade away. But the party leaders are clinging to the unrealistic notion that Donald Trump has a ceiling, and that as the other never-were contenders drop out, that not-Trump vote will distribute itself among the remaining challengers, namely Cruz and Rubio. Bush's people will split between Kasich and Rubio, until Kasich is gone, and then Rubio will overtake Trump, unless Cruz rallies the remaining conservatives to his cause by then, in which case he will.

Here's the problem with that thinking, and the unexpected development even Cruz could not foresee: that is not what's happening. When Christie and Fiorina quit the race, Trump picked up as many of their supporters as anyone else did. With Bush gone, and when Carson follows, he's likely to do the same with theirs. The exit polls show Trump actually beat Cruz among evangelical voters in South Carolina, 33-27%. Yes, a plurality of the born-again Constitution-thumpers of the Palmetto State voted for the Antichrist Himself, Donald "New York Values" Trump. So if Trump has a ceiling, it may well be vaulted, and made of gilded marble. It is Trump, not Cruz, not Rubio, who is consolidating the various lanes of the Republican Party. He may not be in control of the party's moderate establishment, but the voters in that lane are all aboard the Trump Express. Trump won 34% of self-described moderate voters in South Carolina, with Rubio next at 23% and Kasich third with 21%. Cruz was a distant fifth among that group, at just seven percent. Trump won among voters who identify as conservative, too, beating Cruz by six points. He's pulling Tea Partiers, and he's attracting libertarians. South Carolina Republicans who are "angry" at the federal government voted overwhelmingly for Trump. So did those who are looking for a candidate who "tells it like it is" and "can bring needed change." The conventional wisdom that Trump is only pulling a third of the vote, so the other two-thirds will naturally coalesce around his last remaining opponent, is flawed. Many of those "other" supporters turn out to prefer Trump once their first choice falls by the wayside.

So while some suddenly-unemployed Bush strategists and mainstream pundits and deep-pocketed donors wait for Trump to crater, and for the anyone-but-Donald vote to consolidate around Rubio, or Cruz, or even Kasich (wow, really?), Trump speeds ahead and leaves the others to eat his exhaust. It's hard to look at the primary calendar and see where Rubio picks up a much-needed primary win, even with the "Marcomentum" of his second-place finish in South Carolina (a state he vowed to take just a week ago). Cruz is likely to score some victories in some of the larger Southern Super Tuesday states (most notably, the largest of them all, his home state of Texas), but his long-range plan of using his Tea Party/evangelical base as a springboard to a March 1st primary romp no longer seems realistic. Trump has more of the evangelicals in his corner than even the man who built his entire candidacy around them. If Cruz can't win his own lanes in a state as conservative as South Carolina, and Rubio can't win a state he prioritized from the outset, even with the endorsements of its three most popular conservative officeholders, it's hard to see where they force Trump into a pit stop. It's far more likely they end up in the growing pileup behind him, nursing whiplash as they try to figure out how in the world he ran them all off the road.

About Doug

Doug began his career as a copy boy at the New York Times & then moved to California to play in a rock band. After hundreds of gigs and one Indie album failed to make him a rock star, Doug returned to journalism, working for AP Radio & San Francisco station K-101. He did a brief stint at KGO before joining KCBS in 1990. Doug covers politics for KCBS, and also does special features and investigations. He has won more than 200 broadcast journalism awards, including a duPont-Columbia Special Citation, 10 National Headliner Awards, five national Edward R. Murrow Awards & a record eight awards from the national Society of Professional Journalists - more than any other reporter, in any medium. Doug was also the first three-time winner of the AP's Reporter of the Year Award for California/Nevada & has won it four times overall.
Doug was born in New York City, raised in Manhattan and Wisconsin, and has a degree in History from Brown University. He lives in Oakland with his wife, Dr. Sara Newmann. And yes, he still plays music! He is the bass player for the Eyewitness Blues Band, made up of broadcasters from KCBS and CBS-5 TV.